25 November 2014

As Defense News reported last month, the Canadian government is planning another upgrade and life-extension program for its CF-18 Hornets, this time to keep the fighters flying through 2025. The federal cabinet in Ottawa has been intending to replace the RCAF’s 78 Hornets with 65 F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighters. But that purchase has been on hold for a few years, whether for Lockheed’s delayed delivery or the government’s introspection. The new program means that any purchase of new fighter jets is effectively pushed right from 2018 until about 2023, assuming a roughly two-year transition for accepting the new JSFs and retraining the crews. Despite some speculation of an impending purchase of four JSFs earlier this month, the plan seems to be holding. But given the hitherto steadfast enthusiasm for the F-35, why the change?

Simply put, the Department of National Defense needs the money to pay for its incredibly over-priced and not-so-joint Joint Support Ships—along with everything else that isn’t quite fitting into its budget. That’s also why the DND cancelled its long-awaited Close Combat Vehicle procurement for the Army last December. As David Pugliese wrote for the Ottawa Citizen, there are plenty of good and well-priced options for replenishment ships from shipyards in allied countries, but undoing the National Shipbuilding Strategy could constitute an embarrassment for the Harper Government. The Harper Government does not like embarrassments, so something had to give.

What the Harper Government does like, like the Martin and Chrétien Governments before it, is for Canada to pull its own weight internationally. Perhaps most Canadian defense procurements have been “long-awaited” over the past two decades, and Canadian defense has been pretty arguably underfunded. But at least both Liberals and Tories have been marching with Canada’s allies when the marching hasn’t been egregiously questionable (as in 2003). In applying military force, those governments have tended to follow what Christian Leuprecht of the Royal Military College of Canada calls the “six-pack strategy”. When NATO throws a party, Canada must bring something as its contribution to global security, so it most often sends six modern fighter-bombers for attacking enemy ground forces. That’s a solid contribution, in line with Canada’s global standing.

Assuming that all the bugs get worked out, buying a few squadrons of F-35s would continue to more than provide for that strategy. With all its wrap-around electronic content, the F-35 is not just by name, but by substance as well, a search-and-destroy strike fighter. In Cicero magazine last month, Jonathan Miller from Aberystwyth University tried to make the case that "The F-35 Was Built to Fight ISIS”. That’s a stretch—without their still-awaited S-300 missiles, even the Syrians would have trouble downing Canadian fighters, and ISIS lacks anything that can reach the high altitudes from which the CF-18s are bombing.

Indeed, the only plausible opponents with air defense systems that could threaten CF-18s in the near term are China and Russia. Perhaps no government in Ottawa wants any part of a fight over the South China Sea, but the aerial policing of the Baltic is an occasional Canadian responsibility. With their AIM-120 AMRAAMs, the RCAF’s CF-18s are probably well-equipped to deal with Russian Air Force's fighters. For dealing with its S-300s and -400s around Kaliningrad and Saint Petersburg, the RCAF could do well with some standoff air-to-surface weapons, which it currently lacks. The F-35 could presumably approach those defenses much more closely, but for a while at least, more capable payloads may be less expensive than more capable platforms.

This is not to say whether the Joint Strike Fighter is the right fighter, in the long term, for the RCAF. If the timing of this refitting of CF-18s is intended for a domestic political audience—to kick the decision on F-35s past the next general election—little will be lost. If the timing is meant to assess the early performance of the F-35s in the hands of other air forces, then the delay is prudent. Either way, the CF-18s will be fine for a few years more.

05 November 2014

The good news about the Eurofighter Typhoon is that it’s apparently a Raptor-killer. The only pilot known to have flown both aircraft, USAF General John Jumper, called the former's air-to-air capabilities a close second to those of the latter. German pilots at Red Flag have bested their American colleagues in mock battles, by keeping their smaller, more maneuverable aircraft on the stealth-fighters’ tails. And with MBDA’s multiple-salvo, fire-and-forget Brimstone missile to be integrated by 2018, the Eurofighter will gain some impressive surface-strike capabilities.

So much for the good news. The bad news is striking as well. As reported last week, the readiness rate of Typhoons in Spain’s Ejército del Aire is very low: only 6 of 39 aircraft (15%) are flyable. In Germany’s Luftwaffe, the figures are better, but still only 42 of 109 Eurofighters (39%) "are currently available for missions, training, and exercises.” For the German fleet overall, the estimated lifecycle costs have doubled since the initial estimate in 1997, from €30 to 60 billion, despite a reduction in the planned fleet from 180 to 140 fighters. Oh by the way, Eurofighters built so far have a manufacturing flaw in the rear fuselage that impugns structural integrity. As a result, according to Agence France Presse, "Berlin has decided to cut the time its Eurofighters spend in the air each year in half, from 3,000 hours to 1,500 hours."

And yet, Eurofighters are flown by the air forces of not just Spain and Germany, but Austria, Britain, Italy, and Saudi Arabia. Oman has ordered twelve. Indonesia is interested, particularly if local assembly is involved. Fairly, Saab’s cheaper Gripen would also be a strong contender, as Indonesia’s total military budget for 2015, despite a 14% increase from 2014, is still less than €6.5 billion. But Jakarta is talking to Eurofighter, perhaps in part because those impressive games against the USAF signal that any trouble from future Chinese aircraft carriers could be readily handled.

Readily handled—if the aircraft themselves were ready! For me, this prompts a question: are reports of low readiness rates endemic to the plane as designed and manufactured, or to those two underfunded air forces trying to maintain it? The RAF seems to be having few problems with its Typhoons as they routinely scramble on Russian bombers coming down from the Norwegian Sea. The RAF hasn’t announced a similar cutback in flying hours, and in any case, recent fuselage problems in F-16s (amongst other aircraft) are being remedied with retrofits.

Thus I suspect that this is a spending problem for two air forces, and a mere marketing problem for Eurofighter. But that doesn’t mean that the problem can be safely ignored. As closely as armaments are associated with the forces employing them, the companies selling them have challenging communications problems with those forces mishandle them. Best of luck to Eurofighter in getting past two customers’ unhelpful inattention to detail.

30 October 2014

In a recent column on Forbes, Loren Thompson offered his "Five Reasons Ex-Im Bank Reauthorization Is Important To National Security”. For this Congress, reauthorization—or not—of the Export-Import Bank has been a vexing political issue, and as Loren puts it, perhaps "for the first time in its 80-year history.” In defense of the Ex-Im (from whose lending, he notes, his corporate supporters benefit quite a bit), he offers the following argument headings:

It’s an interesting essay and worth reading. Unsurprisingly, I think that Loren overstates the case. Specifically, I take issue with several of the points, but can relatively concur with others. Here are my views, in order of increasing support:

3. Loss of foreign commercial customers could devastate the defense supply chain. This is essentially the same point as #2 (see below), just made at tiers of production further upstream. The statement is sweeping, but it is made without evidence. Just which exports would not have been achieves? Which suppliers would have been endangered? Why would we think that the first-tier suppliers would not have stepped in to finance their supply chains?

5. Predatory traders endanger the “arsenal of democracy.” Possibly, but this whole predatory pricing thing has been a canard for decades. What firms lose money for decades in some grand conspiracy to subvert American industry? Really, f this is going on, all the better—let them bankrupt themselves. It certainly worked for the Soviets. In any case, the implementation of anti-dumping legislation may thus be quite problematic, but problem (5) is specifically what those laws are designed for. Loren offers steel as an example, but the US steel industry ran down on the Ex-Im’s watch, so how it’s going to recover now with the Ex-Im’s help is totally unclear. And yes, it’s true that the two (not one) steel plants supplying MRAP armor were owned by Russian and Indian companies. But since those plants were and are on American soil, foreign ownership can only do so much harm.

4. Commercial technologies are becoming more important to the military. True, but the pattern of adoption is uneven. Here it’s important to remember that the joke about the Ex-Im is that’s alternatively called the 'Bank of Boeing’. At times, almost half its work has been for jetliner exports, and frequently to state-owned airlines in sketchy countries. Are airliners and helicopters markedly more important today to the military than they have been over the past several decades? And even if they were, has Defense or Homeland Security had a problem buying from Airbus or Agusta Westland when it has wanted to? I think not.

1. Military and commercial industrial skills are often interchangeable. While this is true, Loren’s example of Navistar and Oshkosh in the MRAP problem misses the mark. In particular, Oshkosh’s foreign sales of even commercial trucks were not a large portion of its business before 2007. So it’s hard to imagine that truck-building capacity in North America wouldn’t be sufficient to manage another surge like that of the MRAP.

2. Foreign commercial sales help military contractors weather defense downturns. That’s also true, but with some caveats. It's definitely the case for companies that make helicopters. It’s hardly the case in jetliners. As intensely as Airbus and Boeing fought for the KC-X contract, even the USAF’s buying would be but a small portion of either’s book of business. After that, it’s hard to find clear examples, so it’s hard to know just how important the Ex-Im really is.

All that said, after reading this, I could just possibly see the argument—for France. The Compagnie Française d'Assurance pour le Commerce Extérieur (COFACE) is the French export credit agency, even though it’s now a private entity operating on the government’s behalf. Regardless, it underwrites a lot of aircraft exports. The French armed forces aren’t close to the size of the US armed forces, so they don’t buy nearly the output of France’s aircraft industries. And unlike Sweden, France hasn’t figured out how to make money on production runs of a hundred or so planes. This means that if the French government considers Dassault, Airbus Helicopters, and others to be strategic industrial enterprises, it may want to grease the skids of their export sales a bit. For the sake of Loren’s argument, this had better be obviously the case for France, or it shouldn’t really be the case for the United States.

16 October 2014

After disseminating some copies of my recent article on language training for counterinsurgency, I received some great thoughts from Dave Foster, a former USMC officer and now test engineer at Naval Air Systems Command:

Yes. I had been thinking in 2006 and 2007 that it seemed fairly clear that the services weren't at all serious about counterinsurgency—what then seemed all the rage—because so few of our officers outside special operations and foreign areas types had explicit, in depth language training and competency. That would have been about the easiest thing to do: America is full of all manner of language speakers. We probably can't really have true armed bureaucrats at the strategic corporal level—too much to pack into a 21 year old brain. But we could have made tens of thousands at the senior NCO level , the 25 to 30-year old squad leaders. Just take the normal grunt routine for a single year, spread that same workload over two year, and fill the remaining time with language and political economy. It could have been done, but that it wasn't shows (a) the continued actual disinterest in the historically normal form of war (small) and (b) the Defense Department’s general sclerosis.

Then again, when counterinsurgency thought was reflowering a decade back, and we were starting to see all of the Kilcullen-like using social science and field anthropology—more or less what Bernard Fall was doing—field research followed by the work in the stacks kinds of academic work—I'd thought that, yes, this was the SunTzu stuff. Learn about the context. Learn your enemy. Learn about the ‘sea' that the ‘fish' were swimming in. But I did not think that this knowledge should be used for do-gooder purposes, the typical bureaucratic command intrusions we've seen for a century or two. Rather, we should be learning about the fish and the sea in order to understand the context of what matters and what doesn’t. This way, we wouldn’t attempt to "solve" things that Americans would see as problems. As Peter Galbraith said, if there was no bridge connecting two thousand year-old towns separated by a river, perhaps there was a reason it wasn't there. So the language/cultural understanding was to be gained in order to understand how to optimally apply carrots and sticks according to the local context, not do things the way we'd do at home—which clearly don't always take in any case.

12 October 2014

I confess that I am, in the words of Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute, "one of those armchair strategists who thinks the military spends too much on unneeded weapons”. In the past few weeks, Loren has written two columns deploring the state of the US Army’s investment spending: $20 billion this year. As he goes on, that is merely

one-tenth of one-percent of the national economy. According to the RAND Corporation, it’s only a fifth of what Americans spend each year on illegal drugs. It’s fifteen days worth of sales at WalMart. That’s how much money our dysfunctional political system provides to equip America’s soldiers.

As a result, and as he entitles his essay, he fears that “The Army’s Technology Edge is Ebbing Away”. I doubt that, but as I wrote once before, I am frankly unconcerned if the US does not dominate in land weapons technology, so long as it does fall far behind. The US Army is huge, its training and doctrine are sound, and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans are vast. Moreover, as Bill Hogan often implores his students at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, when answering questions about whether agencies are doing a lot or a little, we must always ask compared to what?

That $20 billion dollars may be only the equivalent of this or that of things that do not matter. It’s also the largest such budget in the world. It's fully a quarter of Russia’s entire military budget—and the US has a lot of respectably-armed allies helping face down the Russians. It’s also notable that the US Army’s current inventory of equipment—Abrams M1A2s, Bradley M2A3s, V-hulled Strykers, and now Paladin M109 PIMs—is darn good. Only the M113s are really unsuitable.

But wait! Those M113s are being replaced, as the forthcoming Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle (AMPV) moves further towards a mature design at BAE Systems, There has been, of course, some lingering discontent from General Dynamics. As I wrote in March, a more generalized competition might have delivered a better deal to the Army. It’s not that I think that any particular company (in this case GD) deserves a shot at something. Given the Army’s relatively narrowly-written requirements for the AMPV, it might have just entered into a sole-source negotiation with BAE Systems. With a huge inventory of surplus Bradleys in the Army, and deep tacit organizational knowledge of that vehicle in York, Pennsylvania, there probably wasn’t too much point in a formal competition. Had the Army conceived its potential needs-for-value more broadly, that might have been different, but the Army didn’t. Whatever the grumblings, it’s time to move forward.

But, as I alluded above, Loren writes in Forbes this month that the US Army needs a new tracked fighting vehicle to replace the Bradley. I’m delighted that he believes that the vehicle need not carry a whole nine-man infantry squad; I have endorsed this view myself. Specifically, General Dyamics (a business client and contributor to the Lexington Institute) is building for the British Army a new scout vehicle, with not so many seats, in a second iteration of the ASCOD troop carrier it built for the Austrian and Spanish Armies. Thus, he concludes, the US Army could save a great deal of money by just buying this British ASCOD 2 to replace the Bradley.

Here, though, a sole-source contract would be inappropriate. If the Army really did want a new infantry fighting vehicle, and could find the money for it, there are several alternatives beyond the ASCOD 2. BAE Systems could bring two sound ideas. The first would take advantage of that huge inventory: an up-gunned Bradley with a 30 mm Bushmaster II must be considered. Second, BAE Hägglunds’ all-digital CV90 Mark III carries a 30, 35, or 40 mm cannon, and has served most successfully in Afghanistan. KMW’s Puma with its 50 mm cannon should not be dismissed out of hand, even if it is a bit heavier than what the Army would likely have in mind. But whatever the merits of each of these vehicles, none are obviously inferior to the ASCOD 2. In the end, as bad as US government finances really are, I doubt that the Army will do much. But if it does, it certainly shouldn’t rush into another sole-source deal.

03 October 2014

Update (7 October): I mistook the date of publication. The article is just now available.

This morning’s (3 October 2014) Politico Morning Defense asked just that question:

CAN DoD TEACH EVERY OFFICER A FOREIGN LANGUAGE? No answer yet on that one—the Pentagon is late delivering a report to Congress on what it would take to teach every uniformed officer a foreign language. The report is now expected by the end of April. The reason for the congressionally mandated study's tardiness is unclear, but a letter sent to the Senate Armed Services Committee describes the issue as "complex.”

I doubt that complex is the right word. As I argue in a forthcoming a new article in Small Wars and Insurgencies (February 2015, vol. 25, no. 5/6), if military organizations want to take transnational counterinsurgency seriously, they really need to speak the local language of the countries in which they’re intervening. Teaching Pashto or Arabic or other challenging languages to those raised in English (or something yet more easily mastered) isn’t easy, but it is possible, and on a large scale. Every Australian officer graduating from the Royal Military College at Duntroon is expected to attain proficiency in an East or South Asian language by graduation. Why this cannot be required at the academies in the United States is not obvious to me.

17 September 2014

According to Austin Wright of Politico Morning Defense (17 September 2014), the US government director for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program may be in his job for a long time. Lt. General Christopher Bogdan says that Navy Secretary Ray Mabus has signed off on his staying indefinitely, and that he’s now waiting for the endorsement from Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James and Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work. When might he leave? "When Secretary Hagel and Deputy Secretary Work and Mr. Kendall and Mr. Stackley get tired of me," he said. As the story continued,

The [customary] two-year term limit was cast aside as a result of discussions that began two years ago with him and his predecessor, retired Vice Admiral. David Venlet, and senior Pentagon leaders. "We decided that to give this program a fighting chance—it wasn't just me personally; it's whoever's in this job—needs to have the time to make changes that need to be made and see them through," Bogdan said. "The senior leadership agreed with that."

The desire for a longer tenure is understandable. Lockheed Martine certainly has stuck with a consistent cast of characters. Whether as VP or EVP, Tom Burbage was the face of the program from its inception until 2013, and even since then, the team has been relatively stable. That sort of tenure provides a natural advantage to the contractor in negotiations with the government; if the supplier can talk with experience that his customer will never have, it’s hard to keep up with the arguments.

For the foremost example of this sort of tenure on the government’s side, consider the now-legendary success of the Navy’s Polaris missile submarine program. As I wrote in March, when the first ship, USS George Washington, undertook its first operational patrol in November 1960, the program had come in fully three years ahead of schedule, and at a cost overrun of less than four percent. Shepherding the combination of ship, missile, and atomic reactor from concept to completion was a single program manager, then-Rear Admiral William Raborn.

On the other hand, there was Admiral Hyman Rickover, who ran the overall nuclear power program for the Navy, more than occasionally clashing with Raborn and what he was trying to accomplish. Rickover effectively started the reactors program in the late 1940s, and stayed in that job until 1982, when he was 81 years old. That January, Navy Secretary John Lehman forced him into retirement, ended what Lehman called his "viselike grip” on the much of the service. Generals and admirals can indeed overstay their usefulness to the acquisition system.

Should we worry about General Bogdan becoming an immovable fixture? Hardly. First, he’s not nearly as crotchety as Rickover on his best days. Second, no JSF program manager will ever garner the friends in Congress that Rickover amassed. Even if no one is willing to seriously question the future of the program, close association reminds constituents of the JSF's financial and industrial difficulties. Third, we already know how this works. In February 2010, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates fired his JSF program manager, Major General David Heinz of the Marine Corps, for presiding over uncontrolled price increases and schedule slippages. So, if you can fire a challenged PM, you might consider sticking with the good ones when you see them.

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What I Do

Since September 2001, I have been researching and writing about global security challenges, and advising the economic enterprises that provide the tools to address them. Specifically, I help defense contractors and defense ministries with their problems in marketing, planning, and policy analysis.